What It Takes To Train Like Australia's Fittest Men And Women

Training Frequency

When I was a full-time Ironman I trained three sessions a day, five days a week when I was in heavy training. Saturday would consist of one big three hour session in the morning. Sunday was always rest day. This was broken up with pool swimming, surf work, running on sand, track & road, gym work.

Rest Is Best
In hindsight we probably overtrained back in the day. I would normally go to bed after the morning session which was swim training from 5am - 7am. Home breakfast and back to bed at 9am till 10.30am. Then train again at noon. I would have massage every week for recovery and also would utilise physio for injuries.

Training would be lightened a week into a major race to freshen up.

Entry-Level Requirements
The level of skill to be good in the surf is extreme at the elite level. To become reasonable you would need a few years of work. Fitness to acquire is a lot easier to gain than the skills in the surf which can be so unpredictable. Having said that, this is to reach elite level, in order to compete in a race like the Guy Leech Gold you’d need to be a strong ocean and surf swimmer, so your training sessions should definitely consist of ocean swimming as opposed to pool training.

Training Breakdown
With several legs including run, swim, board and ski there’s a lot to work on. Make sure you identify your weaknesses first and always work more on improving those. Try to split the time between them fairly evenly - to get up to speed in a shorter amount of time you would need to train twice a day.

Nutrition
I believe in eating all the food groups and having a balanced diet. Reduce alcohol and saturated fats from your diet as best you can. I also believe in the 80/20 rule of eating well 80 per cent of the time. Obviously when expending the energy that you do with this type of training fuelling yourself correctly is a major part of improving.

Strength Considerations
I trained full-time when I was competing as it was my job and I loved it. We had the time to train for the four disciplines as well as going to the gym but people with jobs are relatively time poor so expecting to train this much is unrealistic. You need to concentrate on the four disciplines first and if you are on top of this then gym training would be a consideration.

Race Pace
The Guy Leech Gold will take the best in the world two hours to complete – but you need to remember that these guys are full-time athletes who have trained since the age of 10 and are very at home in the surf and on the sand! For the weekend warrior it could take anywhere up to an hour or more than that over the 25km course – there will be a range of fitness levels competing so it will be a varied race finish.

The Guy Leech Gold Ironman is open to pros and novices alike, giving people the opportunity to race against some of Australia’s Ironman legends including Trevor Hendy, Craig Riddington and Scott Thompson, as well as today’s champs – including Cory “Chill” Hill, Matt Bevilacqua, Michael Booth and Matt Poole. Click here to register.